About the Poet

Monday, November 25, 2013

Savagery, Cowardice or Racism? Australia understood through the conscience of law enforcement officers

The Police and Civilization!

Europeans and people of
European descent, and to some extent, the rest of the world, have been taken in
by the erroneous notion that ‘civilization’ means skyscrapers, cars, computers,
rocket science and everything else that comes with science and technology. You
ask anyone and that’s what they’d tell you.

But how civilized is a PhD
student who kills innocent civilians in a movie threater? How civilized is a
medical doctor who kills his kids to get at his wife? How civilized is a well-known
physics professor who coordinates a web of child pornography? We never think
about them, do we?

In essence, those who don’t
have the materials mentioned in the first paragraph are considered to be
outside the ‘civilized world’: primitive, savages! However, we seem to have forgotten the
atmosphere that made or still make all these things possible: the cordial
treatment of fellow human beings; the forging of meaningful coexistence; the
capacity to know that other people have feelings and needs; the capacity to
empathize and sympathize, and the ability to realize that pain in you is as bad
as pain in another person. Without these realities,
we are just vicious savages with cars and computers!

Anyone in this world knows the
phrase ‘POLICE BRUTALITY.’ This is a ghastly sight to say the least. These
people, mostly men, treat humans like animals; beating them with no remorse or
human compassion. What comes to mind immediately one sees such brutality is: do
these officers have feelings? Do they feel anything inside them? Are they humans?
Does police academy teach them to be beastly in their treatment of
suspects?Anyone who views these brutal
images would be convinced that police officers acting in such a devilish and
inhumane manner aren’t themselves humans. They are an epitome of exemplary and
contemporary savagery!

On June 20, at a train station
in Sydney, Australia, six police officers brutally tasered and mercilessly
dragged down the stairs a 17-year old South Sudanese young man in the full view
of his friends.The officers,
emotionless and cowardly, descended on the teenager like hundreds of jubilant
villagers excited as they kill a monstrous elephant for a meal.

And we know the case of the
Brazilian student, Roberto Laudisio Curti, gased and tasered to death by police
in Sydney in March 2012. Or the case of Jamie Jackson during Mardi Gras
celebration in Sydney in March this year! So police brutality knows no color,
to some extent!

Anyone with a heart and
conscience would see these videos and be appalled. However, the police see such
videos as routine and normal. Even as one of the teenager’s friends, a girl, kept
on shouting “Excuse me! Would you grab your brother like that?” the police
officers didn’t budge. One wonders what danger an unarmed 17-year old boy would
inflict on six armed, grown men. Besides being treated with beastly savagery,
the teenager was charged with made-up offenses to top up their savagery. The charges
were later dropped after an investigation.

The police are basically above
the law! Who holds them accountable? Ombudsman? I don’t think so!

What makes it even more
appalling is not that six grown men would descend on a kid like excited beasts
in the wild. Indeed, what makes it dangerously appalling and worrying is that
the officers would do it in the full view of people without any care,
compunction. It’s like these officers had left their humanness at home and came
to work with beastly, animal-like hearts.

While research in Australia
shows that Africans, and mostly South Sudanese, are more likely to face
emotionless heavy-handedness and police savagery, police savagery is a global
phenomenon. You can google police savagery in any country and realize that police
officers get away with brutal treatment of average citizens. Their acts are
seemingly academy-training justified as being within acceptable standard
procedures and a few, whose actions are too satanic to be justified, get a slap
on the wrist if they are ever disciplined.

In June this year, The
Australian reported a story of officers in Sunshine, a suburb of Melbourne, in
which the officers were making fun of immigrants. “The officers in Melbourne's west have been caught mocking
African migrants and their local community on racist stubby holders.” If the law enforcement officers have such
attitudes then how do we expect them to perform their duties with fairness? This
is either a systemic failure or what marks the society generally!

Assistant Police
Commissioner, Andrew Crisp said that “This is completely at odds with the high
standards the community rightly demands from its police.” However, because these
officers are not punished severely enough, their attitude never change.

A number of South Sudanese
young men have died under police savagery but no one has ever been held
accountable. Erjok Manyiel, Kon Agau, among others, are some of the young men
the community believes were killed by the Victoria Police! How can you actually
prove the police are at fault when the police force is above the law? Would the
police officers act as if they are above the law if they know the society would
come ferociously at them? As a community that has no strong voice and political
representation, South Sudanese Community in Australia suffers in excruciating
and lonely silence.

While the majority of the
police could be seen as decent and civil in the execution of their duties, the
fact that police savagery is condoned, or even allowed, and those who perform
them not being brought to book, the condoning of such savagery tarnishes the
whole of policing as a profession.

While police brutality knows
no color boundaries, it’s even grave when the racialized state of mind plus the
jittery state of racial relations put the minorities at the receiving end.

Is police savagery and
emotionlessness when interacting with assumed suspects something taught to them
in their academies or is it something born out of individual personality and cowardice?
Do they see societal reluctance and indifference as an official stamp to act as
they like? Think about it!

Where’s Australia as a Progressive Society?

How do we know that the police
officer didn’t lie about a given person having exceeded the speed limit? How do
we know that police isn’t stopping people because of their physical appearances?
How do we expect police officers to rat themselves out when they are wrong? How
do you know it wasn’t the police officer who racially slurred the African
first?

Police officers err every day;
however, the law enforcement has been structured in a way that it allows many
officers to act as if they are above the law. Well, they actually are! All these
questions are asked in every nation, not only in Australia! What makes them
worse in Australia is that Australia is seen as a progressive, inclusive
society! Well, some Australian police officers act as bad as Indian, South
Sudanese or Kenya police.

However, in Australia, Racism (hatred),
unlike in North America where it’s subtle, is ‘in your face.’ From attacks on
foreign students, to racial abuses on tourists on public transit to police
calling African young men ‘monkeys’ and ‘mudfish,’ one just wonders if this is
only a police problem or it is a societal problem across Australia. Is
Australia an openly RACIST society or is the silent majority good and the vocal
minority left to shape the face of the country many of us see as decently
progressive?

The savage hit-and-run killing
of a South Sudanese young man, William Maker, in Perth, Western Australia by a
European-Australian young man, Luke David Taylor, speaks volume about
Australian moral and racial maturity. Besides, the way Ms. Julia Gillard, the
first woman Prime Minister of Australia, was treated as a woman makes someone
like me worry that Australia as a society has a lot to do to join decent,
value-based civilizations. This rotten, valueless, emotionless, vicious and materialized
understanding of civilization is the root cause of police brutality and overt
hatred in Australian society.

If the current prime minister
of Australia, Tony Abbott, then an opposition figure, could treat a woman in a
very uncivil and misogynistic manner, then what do we expect young people to do
to people of other races? While I know Australia is a decent, progressive
society many immigrants, including South Sudanese, have called home, the Australian
society needs to show the face of what we know of it: an inclusive society. We
might not erase racism and hatred as they are part of human nature and some
even genetically inspired, however, Australia has to show that its face is not
the savagery we see in public transit or in the stone-age mentality of some
police officers in Australia!

Young African men live in fear
from those who are supposed to be protecting them. As one African man told AAP
in Melbourne: “He
started chasing me and when he caught up to me he said: `Wogs are faster than
niggers'…If a cop can say that to me, who can I complain to? What do you do
when it's the police who are harassing you?”

Police
savagery and racism don’t undermine victims, it tarnishes image of
Australians in the world and humanity of the police officers. What human being
with feelings and conscience would taser and brutally manhandle an unconscious
teenager surrounded by six monstrous police officers? What responsible,
conscientious human being, with kids and family, would ignore the plea of a
young teenager in relation to ‘in your face brutality?’ How can a driving, ‘civilized’
teenager stop, back up and intentionally run over a person and kill him in
2013? Sometimes Australia NOW feels like Mississippi and Alabama of the 1960s
and Canada of 1990s.

These
savageries have to be holistically dealt with by Australia as a society.
The police find loopholes within the moral fabric of the society to get away with
most of the things they do. Whether it’s police shooting and killing a teenager
in Francisco (US) because of a $ 2 bus fare, or police firing nine shots to kill a
teenager with a knife in Toronto (Canada), or a police officer calling African young men
‘monkeys’ and chasing them with no cause; one has to know that the police
profession needs soul-searching.

If
these officers commit these atrocities and sleep soundly at night then we have
a big, civilization problem. It means the police academies dehumanize these
officers to turn them into emotionless robots and hatred-and-fear-filled savages.
However, if these officers get affected by the atrocities they commit, then the
police academies need to restructure their teaching methods to train decent law
enforcers; not cowardly robots with guns who fire at a mere sound of door
creaking.

Australia,
be the decent country you are! Change the racist face a few would want to give
you! I have been to Australia five times and I was appalled that every single
officer in the airport, working for different federal agencies, wanted to
search me! It’s a random check, they say! How can an officer see me searched by
one officer next to him and still requests to search me! We are different
agencies, he said! I just went through security with no glitch, got searched by
a different officer with a different agency after leaving security check, but…‘hey…mate…you’re
visible I gotta search you too!’ another officer there! Go figure!

What
make us human are not the houses we live in, the cars we drive, the schools we
went to. What makes us human is the capacity to feel the pain of others, the
sympathy and empathy, the values and the ability to see that a stone on my toe
hurts the same way it would hurt on David's or Lee's or Ahmed's or Deng's. Without
those feelings and values, we are nothing but automotive savages confusing material wealth for civilization: values and virtuouscoexistence!

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As someone who grew up in war conditions and lived as a refugee for a long time, I'm sometimes considered by many people in the 'west' to be prone to (or have) low self-esteem, be poor or illiterate. Living as refugees or displaced persons, who depended on the good will of others put people in a situation where they don't think much about themselves. But that's not everyone though.

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